ham over UMass and call them flukes. Basketball sages point out that the press can be beaten by a well-coached team with adept ball handlers and astute pass- ers-and that is true. Ranadivé readily admitted that all an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back: the girls were not good enough to handle their own medicine. Playing in- surgent basketball did not guarantee vic- tory. It was simply the best chance an underdog had of beating Goliath. If Fordham had played UMass the conven- tional way, it would have lost by thirty points. And yet somehow that lesson has escaped the basketball establishment. What did Digger Phelps do, the sea- son after his stunning upset ofUMass? He never used the full-court press the same way again. The UMass coach, Jack Leaman, was humbled in his own gym by a bunch of street kids. Did he learn from his defeat and use the press himself the next time he had a team of underdogs? He did not. The only person who seemed to have absorbed the lessons of that game was a skinny little guard on the UMass freshman team named Rick Pitino. He didn't play that day. He watched, and his eyes grew wide. Even now, thirty- eight years later, he can name, from memory, nearly every player on the Fordham team: Yelverton, Sullivan, Mainor, Charles, Zambetti. "They came in with the most unbelievable pressing team 1'd ever seen," Pi tino said. "Five guys between six feet five and six feet. It was unbelievable how they covered ground. I studied it. There is no way they should have beaten us. Nobody beat us at the Cage." Pitino became the head coach at Bos- ton University in 1978, when he was twenty-five years old, and used the press to take the school to its first N.C.A.A. tournament appearance in twenty-four years. At his next head-coaching stop, Providence College, Pitino took over a team that had gone 11-20 the year be- fore. The players were short and almost entirely devoid of talent-a carbon copy of the Fordham Rams. They pressed, and ended up one game away from play- ing for the national championship. At the University of Kentucky, in the mid- nineteen-nineties, Pitino took his team to the Final Four three times-and won a national championship-with full- 46 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 11,2009 court pressure, and then rode the full- court press back to the Final Four in 2005, as the coach at the University of Louisville. This year, his Louisville team entered the N.C.A.A. tournament ranked No.1 in the land. College coaches ofPitino's calibre typically have had numerous players who have gone on to be bona-fide all-stars at the profes- sionallevel. In his many years of coach- ing, Pitino has had one, Antoine Walker. It doesn't matter. Everyyear, he racks up more and more victories. "The greatest example of the press I've ever coached was my Kentucky team in '96, when we played L.S.U.," Pitino said. He was at the athletic building at the University of Louisville, in a small room filled with television screens, where he watches tapes of opponents' games. "Do we have that tape?" Pitino called out to an assistant. He pulled a chair up close to one of the monitors. The game began with Ken- tucky stealing the ball from L.S.U., deep in L.S.U.'s end. Immediately, the ball was passed to Antoine Walker, who cut to the basket for a layup. L.S.U. got the ball back. Kentucky stole it again. Another easy basket by Walker. "Walker had almost thirty points at halftime," Pitino said. "He dunked it almost every time. When we steal, he just runs to the basket." The Kentucky players were lightning quick and long- armed, and swarmed around the L.S.U. players, arms flailing. It was mayhem. Five minutes in, it was clear that L.S.U. was panicking. Pitino trains his players to look for what he calls the "rush statè' in their op- ponents-that moment when the player with the ball is shaken out of his tempo- and L.S.U. could not find a way to get out of the rush state. "See if you find one play that L.S.U. managed to run," Pitino said. You couldn't. The L.S.U. players struggled to get the ball inbounds, and, if they did that, they struggled to get the ball over mid-court, and on those occa- sions when they managed both those things they were too overwhelmed and exhausted to execute their offense the way they had been trained to. 'We had eighty-six points at halftime," Pitino went on-eighty-six points being, of course, what college basketball teams typically score in an entire game. "And I think wè d forced twenty-three turnovers at halftime," twenty-three turnovers being what college basketball teams might force in two games. "I love watch- ing this," Pitino said. He had a faraway look in his eyes. "Every day, you dream about getting a team like this again." So why are there no more than a handful of college teams who use the full-court press the way Pitino does? Arreguín-Toft found the same puz- zling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn't fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lop- sided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft's data- base, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times-and lost a hundred and nineteen times. In 1809, the Peruvians fought the Spanish straight up and lost; in 1816, the Geor- gians fought the Russians straight up and lost; in 1817, the Pindaris fought the British straight up and lost; in the Kan- dyan rebellion of 1817, the Sri Lankans fought the British straight up and lost; in 1823, the Burmese chose to fight the British straight up and lost. The list of failures was endless. In the nineteen-for- ties, the Communist insurgency in Viet- nam bedevilled the French until, in 1951, the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare- and promptly suffered a series of defeats. George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colo- nists so well in the conflict's early stages. "As quickly as he could," William Polk writes in "Violent Politics," a history of unconventional warfare, Washington "devoted his energies to creating a British- type army, the Continental Line. .&amp; a re- sult, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war." It makes no sense, unless you think back to that Kentucky- L.S.U. game and to Lawrence's long march across the desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress sol- diers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six